The two RV Gypsies visited the
National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes
16330 Grotto Road
Emmitsburg, Maryland
(Frederick County)
June 21, 2017

The National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic shrine devoted to Our Blessed Mother Mary, is a place of worship, pilgrimage, evangelization and reconciliation. The bell tower was dedicated in 1964 as a gift of the Pangborn Foundation of Hagerstown. It is 95-feet high and crowned with a 25- foot, gold-leafed bronze figure of the Blessed Mother.

Above the lovely valley of Emmitsburg, situated high on the Mountainside, where nature displays itself in all its wild and picturesque glory, sits the National Shrine Grotto of Lourdes, a shrine which traces its linage to the very beginnings of the spread of Catholicism in America.

Indelibly linked with Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, the Shrine is one of the oldest American replicas of the revered French shrine, dating to about two decades after the apparitions at Lourdes (1875), although the site had already been in use for more than seventy years as a place of prayer and devotion.

This holy mountain sanctuary of historic importance has been devoutly tended thought the years and attracts thousands of pilgrims from all parts of the world for prayer and meditation.  It has been a place of religious sanctuary for years and years, and like its French originator, it has attracted not only the spiritual but scholars from Universities and accredited online colleges alike. It is places like these that we should always cherish and protect.

Karen Duquette sometimes photographs "naked" trees because she likes the shape the trees form. The one shown below was in St. Anthony's Shrine Cemetery.

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